About suffering they were never wrong
by Alexis Machine
Summary: Four semiconnected vignettes, by theme more than plot in any way. A theme of unconnectedness and insecurity, though class also enters it. Yeah. That sounded deep.
1. Kaylee

I write for a dead alive show that Joss Whedon owns and I do not. Nor do I own Annie Proulx's story "Brokeback Mountain," which everyone should read, from which I, er, borrowed certain concepts/lines. Anyway, I had the idea of presenting a look at two very different relationships that I have strong feelings about, especially as they both cross class lines in interesting ways, and as a way to write inside a certain character's head where some real insecurity that I can see in certain episodes (War Stories, Objects in Space) lies.

So, anyway... to Amelia, my dear friend. Hopefully she won't mind having this galumphing dirigible dedicated to her.

"Kaylee"

Kaylee liked to bury her face in Simon's back and breathe his flesh. He was soft, a little tougher now than he was, and smelled like soap and clean skin, the memory of antiseptic wash and good cologne from a fancy store on Osiris that stretched hundreds and hundreds of feet up like a big glass mountain that would light up against the night sky. Sometimes, even though she knew it was, his hands on hers, on her body, in her hair, didn't feel real, nor did their torsos touching, skin to skin, his smooth skin soft as sin under her fingers, tanged with a sweet, slight sweat smell after sex. It didn't seem real to her, nope, not at all. It couldn't be, could it? Kaylee smelled like engine grease, no matter how hard she scrubbed, was short and hippy, and the mirror didn't like her. Every morning when she looked into it the cloudy girl there would scrunch up her face and wonder at the weird teeth, small breasts, eyes too close set, and wonder how she could be silly enough to think that the young man on the bed would be hers forever. He was too handsome, too well bred, too... everything for the silly little mechanic's daughter from a rim planet who'd accidentally rutted her way onto a ship that threatened to fall out of the sky every time a pebble passed too close. Kaylee! she could hear Mal holler over the intercom, If you blow my gorram ship up, and we die, I am going to kill you! That made her smile in spite of herself. Mal pretended to be so fierce, Kaylee thought, but River was right when she called him Captain Daddy. There, she thought, when the cloudy girl smiled. I aint too bad looking, if I smile, and I smile a lot, so maybe he won't notice my little chicken pox scars and the gap between my front teeth. It was no use. She frowned again. Simon was for someone like Inara, someone classy, not just some little prairie bird that you could roll over on after a hard day and then fall asleep. Kaylee put the mirror girl out of her head. She had him right now, and that was all you could ask for, all you could hope for. 

Kaylee slid under the covers and wrapped her arms--strong for a small woman, that was from working so hard--around his middle. He stirred and she kissed between his shoulders, getting a taste of him to last until the morning came. He tasted like so sweet. She sighed into him: "I sure wish I could quit you." 


	2. Inara

Here I write for a dead alive show, that Joss Whedon owns, not me. Nor do I own Vishnu, nor Hanuman. I do own some plaintains, though.

"Inara"

Inara sat in the lotus position on her richly appointed purple mat with gold leaf tassles. She found it paradoxically hard to meditate on Serenity, sometimes, so she fixed her mind on Brahman and his lotus, emanating from Vishnu's navel, everything flowing out from him and into him, out from and into his dark, implaccable, mysterious eyes like the universe waking up after a long sleep and stretching limbs that were too heavy to even contemplate, a metaphor, just like the lotus and Vishu and Brahman himself were all just metaphors to describe something bigger and more wonderful, impossible to describe because it was description, itself. It was no use. It should have filled her up and made her whole and empty, and the same time, but that serene, timeless face that was no face kept turning into Mal, smiling like Hanuman, teasing her. One never knew when the door would explode open and there Mal was, wearing that lopsided goblin grin. He wasn't always loud, though, Inara thought, no. He could creep as silently as the tendrils of cardamon and coriander burning in her incense pipes. Once he'd crept through the door while she meditated and folded himself, cat quiet, in front of her and watched until she was done, as still as Vishnu sleeping. She'd returned from her trance state surprised to find him there, and a little outraged, until he answered her heated question, "Why are you here Mal?"

"You calm me down sometimes," he said, "when I've got a headache or a bad belly. God knows I've had enough of that since it's just been Jayne and Kaylee cooking."

It was a moment of rare nudity, and she could not bring herself to claw the tender flesh beneath his shell so that it scarred over too. She bowed her head, instead, and closed her eyes, again, stretched out her atman mind to touch his. Their third eyes kissed with an uncommon passion and merged into something dark and sweet, poetic and perfect, so rich that it could not be real. It was a feeling beyond feeling, a being beyond being, and everything flowed into and out of the union of their tantric mirrors, Kali and Shiva embraced each another, all eight arms entwined. 

Their minds broke off from one another, gasping. Mal and Inara still sat, as quiet and serene as if they'd never moved. They hadn't, had they? She could not tell, she did not care. Some thing were so profound that they could not be spoken, could not be thought, could not even be. She opened her eyes to find him watching her, again. He wore the mask of hardened melancholy that he mostly wore when he was alone, or thought no one was looking, when he leaned back in Wash's old chair and stared into the Black, asking questions that were impossible to articulate. Inara wondered if it ever answered, if he could understand it if it did. The silence grew between them and breathed. When Mal finally spoke the words came with difficulty, as if his throat was parched. "I've gotta go check the sensors. Make sure we don't hit a bump, or nothing. Then I guess I'll head to bed."

"Good night Mal. Sleep well." She knew how likely he was to sleep or have a good night, sitting with his boots propped on the control panel, idly fingering a plastic stegosaurus' tail, maybe singing softly to himself, or reciting sad poetry. Mal was not the only one adept at observing from the shadows. She'd heard him, once: And every tongue, through utter drought, was withered at the root; we could not speak, no more than if we had been choked with soot. Barely more than a whisper but it carried, it carried, it carried. 


	3. Simon

Here I write for a dead alive show that Joss Whedon owns and I don't. Pity my lack of power. Pity it deeply.

"Simon"

Simon lay awake and thought of River. Kaylee slept like the innocent always seemed to. She sighed against his back and sank deeper into him. It amazed him that she could get any closer. They already lay like one flesh, not just when they were having sex but whenever they were together. Romantic love was a joke. Simon knew it. You couldn't get through college without learning THAT. Everyone had to take at least one literature class, even pre-med students as gifted as Simon Tam. Romance had been created 1300 years ago by French troubadors wandering around and playing on their lutes for bored lords and ladies. He tried to imagine the scene, tried to place himself and Kaylee in it, and could not. She would never fit in at a French court, with banners flying, and he was always nervous, never able to assert himself, unless he was in an operating room with bloodied hands, standing over a gaping wound. 

That was how he'd met Kaylee, wasn't it? He'd talked to her, of course, before signing on to this fool's errand, but he'd really met her, known at least the physical inner secrets of her grach in a way that no one else could, after the Alliance agent shot her. Standing over a gaping wound. Simon remembered bargaining with Mal, over whether or not he'd pull the bullet out of her small intestine, and felt ashamed. It was a nasty wound and would have been a slow and painful death, probably even if Zoe had been able to find and remove the slug. He thought of Dr. Lin Xi Han, an old Sihnonese man, the most revered surgical ethicist on Osiris, and a class called "The Healer's Nature." Dr. Xi Han had been a cardiovascular surgeon for thirty-five years. He was thin and bald with wispy white mustaches and a voice like paper sliding across glass. "The Healer's nature is to heal. It is not a choice. You must revere life, children. Every one you operate on is one like you. Their blood moves like yours. You will know this when you cut into them, when it splashes up onto your clothes and runs hot across your hands. You are sons and daughters, wives and husbands, sisters," Simon felt those dark, almond shaped eyes boring into him, across the years, "brothers, lovers... so are they. They are just like you. They are you, for you are made of matter, just as they are, and all matter is the same matter, which is the heart of this matter." He smiled, and grew serious, again, " When you forget this," he said, "you are just a butcher, no better than a man who carves dead flesh."

Would he have refused to operate if Mal hadn't turned the ship around? Would he have let her die? The question disturbed him and, like all those that did, Simon could not push it away. It was dark. He could not see, so instead he enjoyed how her ribcage rose and fell, smelled her hair, and felt her sleeping. Would River's life have been worth it, traded against hers? It was another question that disturbed him, so Simon used her soft smell, flowery soap undercut by engine grease and human skin, to destroy it.

He did know that saving her life had saved his own soul, though. She had made a frightened young man into a healer once again and, through her gentle touches, healed him in return. 


	4. Mal

Here I write for a dead alive show that Joss Whedon owns and I don't. Wash's, of course, owns the dinosaurs that serve as something of a locus for Mal's angst, but he doesn't mind him borrowing them.

"Mal"

Mal stared out into the Black. Inara was behind him, somewhere, in the soft focused shadow. She slid in on slippered feet, but you didn't last as long in this line of work as Mal had if you didn't hear everything, even where there wasn't any sound. It was a nervous way to live, but...

He didn't think of the living ones, much, on nights like this. There were too many of the dead clamoring for his attention for the living to keep up. His mother, Book, all those men left in Serenity Valley. Aint much of a sergeant, Mal thought, that lets all but one of his people die, and then lets half of her die, too. It was as impossible to NOT think about Wash as it was painful to think about him, sitting in his chair like this, stroking a dimetrodon's ridged back. The stars didn't care. Neither did the Black. Mal sometimes wondered about the Shepherd and his God, where that God lived, out in all this nothing, and if the Shepherd was there with him, now. Mal hoped he was. It was all the poor old fellow deserved for caring about those poor miners and a certain pack of dirty space-rats as much as he did, even if it did drive Mal crazy sometimes to hear him go on and on about God this and Jesus that. He wanted to talk religion, all the time, except when he was drunk, and that was the only time that Mal WANTED to talk about it. "Shepherd where was God," he'd ask, "when I was in Serenity Valley that he didn't hear my prayers? Where was he when we was eating rats, getting blowed the hell up, drinking piss and looking mighty hungry at our own dead and wounded? I want to know that, Shepherd."

Book would always look really tired when Mal brought this up and say, "Same place he was when I..." and then take a long drink of something nasty when he thought better of finishing. Their late night go-she sessions, more than a year's worth of them, weren't very productive, when you got right down to it, but it was good to have someone to get drunk with that didn't sing or get naked or start sobbing or try to kiss you, all the time. Mostly, Mal reflected, it was just good policy in general to get ripped with someone who wasn't named Jayne Cobb.

The living wormed into his thoughts, too, on nights like this, but it was a Top 40 From the Core of all the bad stuff. How Nara's face contorted with fear when Gulchak had his heavy arm around her neck and the gun pressed to her curls, Kaylee whimpering after Niska's men had done their worst to her, Zoe's long silences. Well, longer silences. There was no one to drink with, any more, and it was bad, Mal knew, to drink by yourself. He'd seen enough ranch hands trying to throw that monkey off their backs to know there wasn't any winning that way. Land had been drunk when the horse threw him and he broke his neck, and so was Jon when he got stabbed in that bar fight at Shadow's one small saloon in Ranch Town, where all the cowboys met to drink and whore when they drove the cattle in to sell to merchant men on ships almost as reputable as Serenity.

The idea of saying something to her crossed his mind. It'd beat sitting here alone, even if they did get into a scrape over something stupid. They fought over the same stuff, over and over again. He'd stopped calling her a whore, though. That ba dan Ranch Burgess... Mal didn't have any high flown conception of himself as an overly intelligent man, but he did know where that line of thought ended up leading you. There's another dead one for you, Reynolds, Mal thought. He tried to remember Nandi as the sassy, tough frontier bitch that he'd slept with and laughed with, winking green eyes and wicked mouth, not the twisted smoking corpse she'd ended up as.

Instead of opening his fool mouth, Mal decided to sit here, alone with the emptiness outside, but not inside. Calling yourself empty inside was a way to cover up the hurt under a big blanket. Something that was empty COULDN'T really hurt, but nothing could be really empty, could it? Not even the Black was empty, even though you thought of it that way. It was full of stars and planets and ships and everything other thing else there was. That's how your innards were, just a big ol' vacuum like the Black, and it sucked in every face twisted in pain, every ragged, hurting breath, every pair of dead, open eyes. Inara slid back into the darkness, to her shuttle. Mal shut his own eyes and took a deep breath. If you can't fix it, he thought, you've gotta stand it. 


End file.
